Ignore the Odds

Status games on steroids and scowls from seat-mates

✍️ Saturday, July 1

“Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.”
—Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things

We are not meant to compare ourselves to eight billion people.

I know I’m not the first to remind you that social platforms, including Substack, are status games on globalized steroids. With so much exposure to people who are (actually) smarter, funnier, prettier, and/or fill-in-the-blanker, the logical conclusion would be not to jump in. Right?

In Zero Sum Logic, this is correct. If you can’t be the best author, the best podcaster, the best thinker about your topic, the prettiest/skinniest/curviest/strongest in physical appearance, why try?

Even as I type these words, I’m struggling to hear my own voice amidst a rapidly accelerating onslaught of mental catalog cards from other writers who have expressed their thoughts on this very topic, earlier than me and better than me.

When I saw that Emily Ratatowski launched a new podcast, High Low with EmRata, I was mesmerized by her cover art. It was a close-up of her face, trendy misshapen bangs, full red pouty lips.

What would it be like to go through the world with a face like that?! I wondered, a hot wave of insecurity washing over me.¹ Does it mean I shouldn’t put my own face on my cover art?

No, it doesn’t. (Though I still took mine down months later to freshen up the tiny thumbnail.)

Taste is subjective, as is personal experience.

You are unique when placed in the precise context that is this moment in history, with these technological tools at your fingertips, with your unique mind and life experiences and constraints, and with how your soul’s expressive signature resonates (or not) with the people you’re meant to reach.

If you take the next exit off of the Highway to Winning/Being the Best, you might encounter an interesting scenic detour.

Can the Highway to Winning do great things for your career? Sure! But what if you are miserable along the drive?

I remember how gripped by fear I felt while riding as a backseat passenger in a Tesla many years ago.

We were heading down a wide six-lane Southern California road.

The driver had his hands off the wheel and was floating through conversation, eyes concerningly off the road. The car started accelerating toward a red light, and next thing I know, we’re blasting through it.

The driver hadn’t even noticed that the light was red. Thankfully no one else was coming toward us from a perpendicular lane.

Later, the car accelerated again toward a stop sign, only to screech ungracefully to a halt just in the nick of time.

It was all too fast and unpredictable for my comfort. We got where we were going, but at what emotional cost?

Maybe Tesla has fixed these types of glitches by now, but I still can’t shake that memory of nerves multiplied by car-sick nausea.

This is not how I want to get where I’m going.

In Free Time, I share a mantra that, “How we bake is as important as what we make.”

The energetic fingerprints of what we’re creating are embedded in the final output, and will even inform that product’s resonance in the market.

Every day, I start to talk myself out of writing or sharing something here, because it has already been said better, funnier, more clearly, or by someone more famous.

I cringe while I write, noting all the clichés. It harkens back to the time my tough-as-nails-New-York literary agent told me upon submitting the first draft of the Pivot book proposal that my writing skill wasn’t up-to-par, and that I needed to take some classes.

(I subsequently bought a bunch of books on how to avoid clichés,² but didn’t read them, and failed to sign-up for any in-depth writing courses through NYU. Oops.)

So every day that you see a post go live here, it also means I have talked myself back into the game. Not the game of trying to be the best, the game of trying to express myself best.